The death of a loved one. It’s the least funny thing in the world, right? Try telling that to Sam Morrison, who has made a show about his bereavement journey since losing his partner to Covid in 2021. Sugar Daddy, already well received in New York and in London this week, is a wonderfully intimate offering from the 28-year-old that stints neither on big laughs, nor on honesty about Morrison’s grief. It’s a case study in the leaps comedy has taken, and continues to take, into territory that until recently most professional jokers would have considered out of bounds.
Morrison’s show is no outlier, as a piece in the New York Times makes clear: there is a rash of standup shows about grief. Why so? Consider it the logical endpoint – or latest stage – of the process that has seen comedy, growing in confidence as an artform, address itself over the last decade to ever less comical subject matter. All those shows about cancer, mental ill health and trauma; the dead-dad shows, supposedly so common as to become a cliche? They were the gateway. Now comics are handling the hard stuff: raw, recent, real-world bereavement.
